A Place We Can Share
by Emma Arthur
Summary: Series of ficlets set in my Every Chance We Get universe for #AutismAcceptanceMonth.
1. Chapter 1

Avril is Autism Acceptance Month. This year, Alex Haagard posted a prompt list ( /alexhaagaard/status/1111737551394668544) for each day of the month. I want to try to follow it and write as many ficlets as I can (I probably won't manage every day, but the prompts are awesome).

This is set in the same universe as Every Chance We Get. I know it's been a while since I posted a chapter of that, and this ficlet series is a bit of a spur of the moment thing. I haven't even introduced the Librarians crossover that's planned in that series, but whatever. I want to do this.

The fics will be very short, and set at different times in Eliot, Parker, Jake and Cassandra's lives. Some will technically contain small spoilers for the main series, but should be readable on their own anyway. As a reminder, in Every Chance We Get, all four characters are autistic, and Eliot is also blind and has some spinal cord issues from an accident before the series.

First prompt is **comfort**, and it's set sometime after season 5 of Leverage.

* * *

**Comfort**

"Can I come?" Eliot asks.

Parker peeks out from under the weighted blanket and hums her agreement. Eliot can feel her watching him intently as he removes his shoes and leg brace and slips underneath what amounts to a blanket fort.

Eliot sighs as he feels the weight settle over him, almost instantly calming his crawling skin. It's been a long day for all of them, but he's the one who's had to navigate a party while pretending to be sighted. He didn't even get to fight anyone.

Parker got too overloaded to go on sometime during the night, and she's been hiding here ever since. Eliot has to admit her little space is nice and comforting. He feels almost sleepy, under the weight of the blanket.

He's not surprised that Hardison joins them them an hour later, once he's done with the job cleanup. "Are you guys alright?" he murmurs before sitting down on the floor. He doesn't come closer. He's understood long ago that neither Parker nor Eliot like to be touched sometimes.

Not by him, anyway. He and Parker might be a couple, might cuddle and kiss and more sometimes, Hardison still hasn't learned how to hug with the right amount of pressure, to touch in just the right place.

"We're good," Eliot says quietly. Parker nods, her head close enough that Eliot can feel it, and moves closer to Eliot until he puts his arms around her. He squeezes her tight.

"Good," Hardison says. "Not that I was worried or anything."

Eliot smiles. He would deny it to anyone else, but he loves these guys so much.

Being with them, having them close is the best thing that ever happened to him.


	2. Chapter 2

[implied ABA]

Day 2 prompt is **Flap**.

Eliot and Jake are about 4 years old in this one.

* * *

**Flap**

"Come on Jake, say hello," Mommy encourages.

Jake shakes his head no and rocks on his heels lightly, looking at the floor. Eliot looks on sadly, hating his brother's discomfort.

"Hello," Eliot says to the stranger looming over them, intimidated, hoping that maybe Mommy will back off if he says it instead of Jake.

"Eliot, you already said hello. Now it's Jake's turn," Mommy says sternly.

"It's alright," the stranger says. She has a soft voice, but Eliot doesn't like her. "We'll work on that. That's what I'm here for, isn't it?"

"Yes," Mommy answers. "Eliot, come on, we're going to the store."

"But Jake?" Eliot asks, seeing his brother rock harder in panic. He makes fists with his hands and hits them together, noiselessly.

"We'll leave Jake with the nice lady. She's here to help him."

But… Eliot wants to say. Jake doesn't talk. He can't say what he needs if Eliot's isn't there.

"Don't worry Eliot, your brother will be fine," the lady says.

Eliot doesn't believe her. He shakes his head vigorously. "I don't want to go," he says.

"We're going, Eliot," Mommy takes his arm firmly. Eliot shudders and tries to shakes her off. Jake makes an aborted gesture toward him.

"You're gonna be okay," Eliot murmurs to him, resisting Mommy's pull. "We'll be back soon. You can do this."

Jake claps his fists together again, shaking his head. Eliot raises his own fist to bump it lightly on his brother's.

He looks back as Mommy pulls him away. The stranger kneels in front of Jake and grabs his hands, forcing them back to his sides. "Quiet hands," she says.

Eliot looks down at his own free hand, discreetly flapping, and stills it sadly.

* * *

Jake didn't speak until about 5, so he was diagnosed early on, but Eliot fell through the cracks of the system because he masked better than his brother.

I wanted to do something cute for this prompt, but this came instead. I recently translated Julia Bascom's beautiful text "Quiet Hands" into French, so I guess that was an influence for this prompt. Go read it, it's a really great text about the wrongness of ABA and forcing autistic people to conform and stop stimming (I can't put in a link, but her blog is called Just Stimming).

You can also find me on Tumblr (theemmaarthur).


	3. Chapter 3

Day 3 prompt : **Infodump**

Set sometime in the Librarians, late season 1 or early season 2.

* * *

**Infodump**

"...And the Russians started using kokoshniks, which are a specific type of corbel arches. The name comes from the head-dresses worn by married women at the time in Russia. There were more than a hundred churches built in Moscow alone by the end of the 17th century in the flamboyant style."

Jake takes a breath and looks around him. He realizes he hasn't really paid attention to his surroundings while talking. Cassandra is the one he was most focused about, because she's been nodding along and making appropriate noises, but Jones has slipped out somewhere without Jake noticing, and Baird is sitting at her desk doing paperwork, her interest in his rambling long lost.

Jake doesn't resent them. He's been talking non-stop for half-an-hour about 17th century Russian architecture, so at this point he's just grateful none of them has interrupted him to ask if they could move on. Having colleagues who let him talk about his passions, even if they don't always listen, has been the best change from the oil rig workers who still think of him as a stereotypical cowboy.

And then there's Cassandra. Who is currently sitting on the bottom of the stairs in the Annex, looking at him with a dreamy smile on her face. Who listened to every word he just said, and even asked pertinent questions whenever he ran out of breath.

"What?" Jake asks her, when she continues to stare even though he's stopped talking for several minutes.

"Nothing," she answers, shaking herself. "I like it when you talk about things you obviously love."

"Sorry, I tend to get carried away."

"No, you're just passionate and I like that about you."

Jake gives her a heartfelt, shy smile. He's fairly sure she has no interest whatsoever in Russian architecture, yet she's still here, and telling him she enjoys listening to him. It's possibly one of the best compliments he's ever been given.

Cassandra smiles back, then stands up. "I think I'm going to head home," she says. "But I'm always here to talk more about architecture when you want!"

She somersaults through the room in her usual enthusiastic manner. "See you tomorrow!" she calls, grabbing her coat.

"See you," Jake answers more quietly, but she's already gone.

He rubs his cheek contentedly and replays the conversation in his head. Nodding, he swears to himself that the next time Cassandra starts talking about theoretical physics, he'll encourage her as much as he can.

1


	4. Chapter 4

Day 4 is **Overload**.

Cassandra, 15, soon after finding out about her tumor.

* * *

Cassandra curls up tight in her hospital bed and presses her hands over her ears. It only dulls the noise a little. It hurts. It's too much. Her parents arguing over her, louder and louder, people running in the corridor, the beeps of the machines around her. She wants to remove the pulse monitor on her finger, because it makes all those beeps and it itches on her skin, but it would only cause a ruckus and make it worse. She tried that before.

Instead she closes her eyes tightly. The strong overhead lights still come through her eyelids, so she presses her face into the pillow. The scratchy gown and the covers make her skin crawl with wrongness. She moans and tries to keep her body still.

"Cassandra, what are you doing?" comes her mother's voice, too loud and too close. Cassandra looks up even though she doesn't want to, and her mother's face is right above her, frowning.

"Nothing," she murmurs after a few tries, because the word won't come to her mouth.

Her head hurts. She doesn't even know anymore if it's because of the tumor or just the noise and the fact that she hasn't been able to sleep since she was admitted.

"Cassandra, look at me when I talk to you!" her mother exclaims.

Cassandra has no idea what she was even saying. Even that last sentence she only understands because she's heard it so many times. She forces her eyes to settle somewhere on her mother's face, but she's too close.

"Yes, mother," she murmurs. She straightens her body in the bed, even if it itches so much she wants to tear off her own skin, and lays her hands obediently at her side.

No one notices the fists, and her neglected, growing nails digging into her palms.


	5. Chapter 5

**Texture**

[self-mutilation&scars, implied ABA, food]

Parker, through the years.

This is another one that was supposed to be sweet and turned into something else. And it's a lot longer than planned. But hey, here it is.

* * *

Parker has always loved to touch things. When she was little, even before she learned to walk, she would crawl to the walls and rub her hands on them, to feel their different textures. She liked paint better than wallpaper, which is rougher and coarser. Roughcast can have interesting textures, but usually it just scraped her hands.

She doesn't rub her hands on walls anymore. It took years of adults forcing her away, of "quiet hands"−but how can hands be loud?−of other children laughing at her to break her out of the habit.

* * *

Textures in her mouth are harder. She loves soggy cereals more than anything, but lentils are a no-no. She'll just spit them out and have to wash her mouth with water. Once, a long time later, Eliot makes her lentil soup though, and it tastes fine once the texture is gone.

She likes things that no one else likes. She likes to leave lumps in her hot chocolate, and to eat them so she can feel the powder dissolve on her tongue. If her foster parent, or whoever happens to be taking care of her at the time, mixes the chocolate with the milk, she'll scream. Hot chocolate without the lumps is boring.

* * *

Later, Archie shows her how to cut a painting out of its frame without damaging it. He says it's tasteless, it's better to just take the frame with it, but sometimes it's just impossible.

Parker likes cutting the stretched canvas. It feels nice. She likes it so much that she keeps a scalpel with her, and she steals more canvases from the local art stores to cut them to pieces.

* * *

She spends two hours in one of the art stores, once, touching all the papers. They're beautiful. Made in Japan and Korea and Italy and other places far away. Made for watercolor, or oil paint, or graphite or ink. Parker barely has any idea what this means, she knows nothing of art even though she knows a lot about stealing artworks, but the papers are incredible.

Some of them are so thin that they're transparent, and some so thick that they can stand on the edge. Some are rough and grainy and some smooth and soft. There are textures here that she's never felt before, and she loves everyone of them.

In the store, no one looks at her funny when she touches the sheets of paper. Artists do that all the time. Artists are weird, like she is.

* * *

She cuts through other things than canvas. She steals pieces of paper, to see how they cut, but they're nicer to just stroke. She builds up a whole collection of them, but she never cuts them again.

She moves on to fabric, and sometimes other, harder things. Archie has an old wooden desk, and she likes to make indentations in its surface. To leave a mark. She never writes her name like she saw other kids do on the school desks, when she still went to school. It's pointless. She just makes little marks.

One night, after Archie goes back to his real family−he showed her pictures of his daughter, today−she feels like leaving a mark somewhere else. She brings the scalpel to her thigh. It leaves a nice, red mark, but the blood is annoying to deal with.

* * *

Years later, most of the marks on her thigh have become white. They're slightly raised, and she likes to touch them. She scratches the scabs off whenever they form, but the scars are nice to rub.

It's the only part of herself that she likes, or that she still touches. She doesn't own a mirror, and she never looks at her face. The red cuts and the white scars, slightly raised under her fingers, have become her reflection.

She doesn't know why she doesn't take the scalpel with her that night, the first time she's worked with a team since she left Archie. She leaves it behind, and she never comes back for it.

She doesn't know why she doesn't need it anymore.

But she never stops touching the white marks to remind her of what she really is.

* * *

There aren't many sexual things she likes to do with Hardison, and he never pushes past her limits. If she says no, they don't ever mention it again. If she even looks hesitant, Hardison says he won't try. But at night, in bed, and sometimes during the day and in other places, she likes to touch his skin. It's soft and smooth, and she enjoys tracing every imperfection, every mole and scar and fold.

Months after Hardison and her start sharing a bed regularly, she decides that his skin has become her favorite texture.

He never touches the little scars on her thigh, never even brings up the subject. They look old by now, so he knows he doesn't have to worry about it.

Parker doesn't say anything, but she doesn't touch her thigh so much anymore.

* * *

Eliot feels the scars once, by mistake. He's directing her through stitching a small wound on her belly, low enough that she's had to remove her pants, and he inadvertently puts his hand on her thigh. He stills for a moment, and Parker wonders if it's because he's trying to figure out what it is, or if he doesn't know what to say.

"You're still doing that?" he asks neutrally.

"No," Parker says.

"Good."

"What would you have done if I did? Tried to stop me?"

"No," Eliot shakes his head. "But there are safer ways to get the same result."

"How do you know?" Parker asks.

"I know about scars," Eliot answers simply. But Parker doesn't miss his hand going to his other arm.

"You ever feel like doing it again, you tell me first, okay?" he says.

"I don't need it anymore," Parker says.

It's the truth. She's found textures she likes better. She can look at herself in the mirror now, and see something else than a broken toy. She doesn't need scars to remind herself of what she is anymore.

She knows exactly who she is.


	6. Chapter 6

Day 6 is **Friendship**.

Jake and Parker, sometime after Jake and Eliot reunite for the first time in years.

* * *

**Friendship**

_Can I come over?_

Jake frowns when he sees the text and its author. Parker. What does she want?

_Why? _he texts back. _Is there something wrong?_

_No, I just want to come, _is the response, a few seconds later. _Is that okay?_

_Sure._

Parker has been to his apartment before, but always with Eliot, she's never just come by herself like this. Jake wonders what's come over her. At least she's texted first. If she had just rung the doorbell, or worse, come in through the window like Eliot told him she used to do, Jake would probably have panicked.

He doesn't bother with tidying up his place. He's comfortable enough with Parker to know that she won't care if there are piles of books on the floor or dirty dishes in the sink, and not to feel self-conscious about them. Eliot is the great cook with overwhelming tidying tendencies of the family. Jake is...not.

"Hi," Parker says when he opens the door. She's almost jumping in place.

"Hi," Jake answers, moving back to let her in.

"This is for you," she pushes a package in his hands. "Eliot said you might like it."

Jake removes the cardboard packaging to find a thick book with a dark blue cover. It's not an old bind, but rather one of these overpriced newly-released academic books that Jake has never been able to afford. A look at the title tells him it's the collection of articles on fifteenth century Arabic mosaics that he's been looking at with envy in the window of the university bookshop every day for the last month.

He rubs the cover, unsure how to react. There are too many questions. In the time he's been looking at the book, Parker has kicked off her shoes and plopped down on his couch.

"I...why?" he asks eventually, less than eloquently, still staring at the book.

"I wanted to," Parker says. "I saw you look at it the other day, and I didn't understand why you didn't take it."

"So you just got it for me?"

"I asked Eliot, and he said it was probably too expensive," Parker shrugs. "But you looked like you really wanted it."

"Did you steal it?"

A year ago, Jake would never even have thought to ask that, but finding Eliot again and meeting his friends−and Jones−changed many things in his life.

"Eliot made me leave money. But it was overpriced, if you want my opinion."

"I know," Jake says. "Academic editors make a ridiculous margin on those books. The authors don't even get paid."

"Seriously? We should look into that as a job, then."

"Parker, I still don't get why you would do this for me," Jake wrings his hands.

Parker shrugs. "It's a gift. You're my friend. Isn't that what friends do?"


	7. Chapter 7

Day 7 is **Pressure**.

I wasn't very inspired today and had little time to write, so this is actually a scene I wrote a while ago for Every Chance We Get. It's set right after they come back from the Stork Job: Parker has a meltdown/shutdown after too many emotions and time on planes.

* * *

**Pressure**

[meltdown/shutdown]

"What?" Eliot growls when there is a knock on his office door.

Hardison opens the door. "It's Parker. I don't know what to do."

He sounds panicked enough that Eliot is immediately on his feet.

"What happened?"

"I don't know. She was bouncing off the walls and talking louder and louder, so I snapped at her and suddenly she was huddled in a corner rocking and banging her head on the wall."

Eliot sighs. "What did you do?"

"Nothing!' Hardison exclaims. "I didn't mean to do anything wrong, I just told her to please stop banging on the table!"

"No, I meant afterwards. Did you try to touch her?"

"I tried to stop her from hitting her head, but she flinched away and started moaning, so I kept away from her. She didn't seem to hear me when I talked to her."

Eliot steps into the conference room ahead of Hardison. He can hear Parker making low humming sounds in the far corner.

He doesn't try to approach her just yet, and instead taking a moment to take in the room's atmosphere. With just the three of them in the sound-proof room, it's fairly quiet but for the low hum of the computer equipment.

"How much light is there in here?" he asks in a whisper.

"The lamps over the table are on, and the screens," Hardison answers.

"Turn the screens off. And can you dim the lights?"

"Done."

"Good. Now is her stuff around?"

"Her bag's in the corridor, but she hasn't opened it yet so I don't know what's in it."

Eliot shakes his head. The situation doesn't quite warrant betraying Parker's privacy like that, though she routinely goes though their stuff. "Can you look on her desk for anything that looks like a toy or jewelry?" he asks instead.

"Sure," Hardison says, sounding puzzled.

Eliot hears him walk away. He approaches the Parker-shaped sound shadow huddled in the corner of the room, keeping his movements slow and his hands away from his body. He crouches in front of her, far enough that he doesn't look like a threat. He tries to think of what would work best, and remembers how Parker hung onto his arm for most of the trip back.

"Okay, Parker," he says quietly. "I'm gonna try something. Is it okay to touch you if I squeeze hard?"

Parker stills her rocking a bit. Eliot waits, with his hands still clearly visible at his sides. After a while, she groans something that sounds vaguely like a 'yes'.

Eliot tries to judge the space between his hand and her arm as closely as possible and grips her shoulder tightly. Despite her slender frame, her shoulder feels well defined and muscled, not surprising given how much time she spent hanging off buildings.

She tenses at first, then relaxes minutely under his touch.

"Does that feel good?" Eliot asks. She hums. "Do you want to try a hug?"

She doesn't react at first, but Eliot gives her time to process his question. After a few seconds, she makes another vaguely positive sound. Without changing the pressure on her shoulder, Eliot shifts so that he's sitting on the floor, in position to get his other arm behind her back without brushing against her. He squeezes her tightly, and she moves fully into his arms.

"That's all I found," Hardison says, coming back into the room.

He still sometimes forgets that Eliot can't see. "What is it?" Eliot asks as quietly as possible over Parker's shoulder.

"Sorry, it's a spinning top. The only other things she has in there are her harnesses and her plant."

"Alright," Eliot says. "It should do. Just spin it where she can see it."

"How is it supposed to help?"

"Shh. We can talk later."

"Okay," Hardison murmurs, lowering himself to the floor beside them. Parker rests her head against Eliot's shoulder, and she settles finally, exhausted.


	8. Chapter 8

**Synesthesia**

Cassandra's synesthesia changes after her surgery. Before, using hand movements to sort and move the numbers was just a mind trick. The numbers didn't actually _move_ under her hands. They changed because she simply visualized them in a different place.

Afterwards, she can touch them, almost. They had a smell and a taste and sometimes a music, but now they also have a texture. They've always had a color and a shape, long before her tumor started changing things in her brain.

She spends hours just playing with numbers. It doesn't feel like it used to, at all. A hand movement can calculate a differential equation, another can multiply ten digit numbers. If she learns them all, the possibilities are infinite. After the first few days, she doesn't even faint anymore during the hardest calculations.

But she doesn't have formal training in math or physics, which means that there is an end to what she can discover. Whatever her calculating power is, the knowledge don't come from nowhere. She doesn't have the vocabulary to understand theoretical physics articles like Jake understands art and architecture.

For a while, she considers going to school, maybe. She doesn't have the money, but if she saves up on her Library salary, she could maybe do it in a few years. She would have to start from the beginning, of course, and it would be long, but she could do it. She's even sure that Jake and Flynn, at least, would encourage her.

But after a few months, she realizes that no, this isn't what she wants. She could probably thrive in a physics lab, sure. But she won't have the things that she's learned she loves most. More than math and physics and research. Magic. The Library. Those people who have grown on her more than she ever expected.

So she won't go into the world and accomplish her childhood dreams.

She will do something better. She will learn magic. She'll keep playing with numbers and their new texture and she'll learn how to use them in ways never heard of before.

And she will have the family that she always dreamed of, here in the Library.

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	9. Chapter 9

Day 9 is **Mask**.

Eliot, reflecting.

* * *

**Mask**

It doesn't feel like a mask, most of the time. He doesn't have to put conscious thoughts into it anymore, not like when he pretends to be sighted for a con. Not like he makes sure not to limp in front of the crew. It's just a part of him.

A part that's heavy.

It took him years to understand that. He didn't, not really, until he met Parker. Until he found someone who could live so freely without the mask. She's such a beautiful human being.

And the mask became even more heavy for Eliot.

It's not healthy. He knows that. He watched Jake craft his own, perfect mask, in high school, and he watched him crash when it became too heavy.

Is it becoming too heavy for him, now?

Is it time to drop it?

Can he drop it?

* * *

Because behind the mask, there is this one terrifying question.

Who am I without it?

How can I be myself, if I don't know who that is?

* * *

Little by little, Eliot opens up. Not often in front of Nate and Sophie, but when it's just him and Parker and Hardison, he lets go of some things.

He still stills his hands when he notices them flying around, playing with his hair or his bracelets. But Parker gives him a bike chain bracelet once, and sometimes he lets himself fiddle with it. Or he takes his guitar off the wall and jams for a while, humming.

He doesn't force himself to talk, anymore. Not when it gets too hard, when it feels like his mouth is burning for trying to form the words that won't come. Grunts are enough.

He cooks, in Nate's kitchen in Boston, and then even more in the brewpub. He cooks to get his mind off things, but mostly because it feels so good.

For so long, he didn't let himself do the things that feel good.

He grifts, because he's good at it, but more and more he doesn't bother to be social and friendly and _normal_ outside the grift. He's just himself, and it's enough.

* * *

Maybe he doesn't need to drop the mask, completely, at once.

Maybe it can wait until he knows who is behind it.

Maybe he can get comfortable with that person, first. On his own, or with his friends to help.

Maybe then he can accept himself.


	10. Chapter 10

**Toys**

Eliot understands that Parker has officially adopted Jake and Cassandra when she starts leaving stim toys everywhere for them. He doesn't notice, at first. It takes Jake coming to him confused several times, after finding a tangle or a chewable necklace in his coat pocket, for him to figure it out.

Parker has a strong, unshakable belief that stim toys are an absolute necessity to have in life. She even converted Hardison to them, though he was doubtful at first. He can now be seen−or heard−fiddling with the little squishy animals that are strewn all over his workspace, or chewing absently on a pencil topper.

Eliot resisted too, but for different reasons. His stims have never involved toys, only his own body, and they're usually so discrete that they can't be seen from the outside. Being _seen_, being branded as _different_, is an old nightmare. It's also something he can't afford in his line of work.

No weaknesses.

But what Parker shows him, slowly, unconsciously, _incredibly_, is that stimming isn't a weakness. Being different isn't a weakness. But hiding who you are might well be.

Parker isn't weak for enjoying sleeping with her Bunny. She isn't weak for carrying at least a dozen stim toys in specially sewn pockets in her clothes, beside her lock picks.

She certainly isn't weak when she picks up before anyone else that Jake is overloaded after a long day and hands him her tangle toy to fidget with. She's not weak when she gives Cassandra the exact hug needed after the latest bad news from her neurologist. She's not weak when she adapts all of her hand flaps so that Eliot can always understand what she's communicating with them, even though he can't see.

So maybe Eliot is not weak when he plays with the bike chain bracelet around his wrist, the one Parker put there against his will in an impressive illusionist move, and it means his skin stops crawling and he can actually hear what Nate is saying in the crowded bar.

1


	11. Chapter 11

**Safe**

The first time Parker feels safe is in Eliot's arms, when he squeezes her tightly and calms down her meltdown. She can finally breathe, and not feel like jumping out of her skin anymore, because Eliot makes a marvelous anchor. She smells his hair and buries her nose in it, and the world rights itself.

The first time Cassandra feels safe is the day she's invited to be a Librarian−for the second time. It's strange, because she's not safe, her coworker hate her because she betrayed them and she still has that sword of Damocles over her head, in her head, the tumor that's killing her. And yet, surrounded by books and magical artifacts of immense power, most of which could crush her right there and then, she feels safe.

The first time Jake feels safe is a little while after that, exploring the Library on his own, finding books he's only dreamed of before. He's found colleagues who may be weird, but they're the good kind of weird. The kind that can accept his weird. Kindred spirits. He's found his long lost brother again, and although there is a lot left to work out between them, Eliot makes Jake feel protected like no one else can. And his job might be dangerous, but at the end of the day there's this beautiful, incredible Library waiting for him, and this knowledge like a cocoon he can wrap himself in to escape the outside world.

Eliot takes longer to feel safe. A lot longer. He thinks, at first, that it happens with Nate, when he can finally say he's doing the right thing, the right way. But that's not safe, just content. It's not safe when he promises to protect Parker and Hardison until his dying day, but it's happy. Loved. Eliot reaches all of the other positive emotions, alive and content and happy and loved, before he gets to safe.

He feels truly safe, one day, when he has Jake and Cassie and Parker and Hardison all around him, in his apartment, and he can watch over them all. The future may bring more pain, but in this moment there is safety.

It's a strange feeling. There's a bit of grief for all the wasted years, all the time running and hiding and hating themselves. But most of it is a relief they never thought they could reach.

A place where letting go is possible.

A safe place.

A home.


	12. Chapter 12

**Uncertainty**

"Do you really think we can make it, just the three of us?" Parker asks, lying upside down on the couch in her and Hardison's apartment.

Nate and Sophie announced they were leaving almost a week ago, but they've only put their suitcases in their car and driven off today. It's not forever, Eliot knows, but they're going to tour the world for a few months, giving them time to decide how and when they want to hold their wedding.

Hardison has been in front of his computer since saying goodbye, almost moping. Even though they don't all live together, the place already feels empty. They'll get used to it. Eventually.

"What are you worried about?" Eliot asks Parker, pulling off his cooking bandanna and sitting down beside her−only slightly more conventionally, his legs crossed under him.

"We're not people people," Parker says. She moves so that her head is at the same height as Eliot's, probably doing some kind of acrobatics on the couch.

Eliot smiles as he parses her answer. "No. But we don't really need to be. With the black book, we already have more clients than we could hope to help in our lifetime."

"But what about the rest? The bad guys? We need to be able to talk with them too."

"We can grift," Eliot answers. "Not as well as Sophie, but we've all learned to do it, right? Just have to be careful to play our strengths."

"With just the three of us, it's going to be tight."

"So we scale down some jobs, or bring in some friends. What do you think about training Maggie?"

"Nate would never forgive you," Hardison says without looking up from his computer.

"I'm pretty sure Sophie's already started. They were thick as thieves last year in Boston−pun intended."

"Maggie would be nice to have," Parker says dreamily.

"We'll make it work, Parker," Eliot insists. "We can do this."

"I guess I'm just afraid I won't be a good mastermind," Parker says. "Communication isn't my thing."

"But you're good at planning. And at thinking outside the box. That's what we need."

"What if I make a mistake? What if I forget to tell you something and one of you gets hurt?"

"It won't happen, Parker," Eliot says. "We won't let it happen. Communication goes both ways. We understand each other."

"Okay," Parker says uncertainly. "We'll be okay."

"We'll be okay," Eliot repeats.

1


	13. Chapter 13

[implied self-harm, mentions of blood and death, autistic burnout and depression]

I am extremely late with this challenge. I had a crazy weak, and I wasn't really inspired by the themes. I may do them anyway later, or just skip them, but for now I'm just going to go on with today's theme.

* * *

**Burnout**

"Jacob Stone, IQ 190. Accepted at the Sorbonne and Cambridge for arts degrees, turned them both down. For the past twenty years under a fake name you've secretly been writing literature on European and Native American art history, all while working on an oil rig five miles from the town where you grew up."

Jake sighs, when he thinks about it again on the plane to Munich. This is all factually true, so why does it sound like the worst possible summary of his life? Beside the fact that his IQ was last tested when he was eight, and IQ isn't a valid measure of anything anyway, there is nothing in Eve's file that he can deny.

But it's what's missing that makes it all wrong.

The number on his IQ assessment doesn't say the reason he took the test in the first place, that he didn't speak until he was nearly five. That when he did, he sounded and moved and acted so wrong that no one except Mom and Eliot would even come close to him. It doesn't say about the years of bullying, and then the years of constant effort to make every part of his personality fit into what people wanted him to be, even if it meant cutting the circle with a saw to make it square.

The universities he turned down don't mean anything near as much as the one he went to, the letter of acceptation that he and Eliot celebrated by getting drunk in their bedroom, the idea of being separated tearing at them. Because Eliot wasn't a college type of person, but Jake was. Jake was supposed to get a degree, probably a PhD, and go on and become a Professor.

The articles he's published, the knowledge he's accumulated, don't reflect how he failed at actually getting the titles he usurps by putting them behind false names. They don't tell the story of the semester he spent at Harvard, getting further behind every day, exhaustion seeping into his bones until getting up for classes became impossible. Until Eliot came to get him, on the first day of winter break, and found him bleeding out on the floor of his bathroom.

No one who knows about his passions understands why he works at his father oil rig. No one but his family knows about the half-year he spent hiding in his big sister's guest room, unable to take on the constant assaults of the outside world. They don't know that the moment he started to come out again, to get better, Eliot came back from the war and it was Jake's turn to take care of his battered, changed brother. They don't know that the one time he seriously considered leaving the oil rig he'd ended up working at for lack of a better option, the day he received a letter from the Metropolitan Library in New York, a soldier in uniform came to the house, and presented his father with a folded flag and a single dog tag.

They definitely don't know about the years it took him to dig himself out of the hole that opened up under him that day. He hid it well. He hid everything well, for so long. Every move, every word, everything calculated, until no one remembered the awkward little boy who didn't speak but sat and read adult-level books of architecture all day. Including himself.

Today, for the first time in twenty years, that little boy has stopped crying and banging on the door of the cell Jake locked him in, inside. That door is now ajar, and a little light is coming through. And Jake is fucking terrified of what letting the little boy out might mean.


	14. Chapter 14

**Creativity**

One thing Eliot loves about Nate and Sophie leaving is Parker's newfound freedom. They had a rough start, adjusting to suddenly being a team of three instead of five, and figuring out what dynamics work for them, but now that she's grown in to the role, she is an impressive mastermind.

Parker doesn't do all of Nate's old job, just like Eliot doesn't handle everything that was Sophie's department. Hardison is usually the one who talks to the clients now, for example. He is, after all, the less socially awkward of the three of them. Eliot reminds Parker to communicate what's on her mind, and to listen to their thoughts when she gets carried away. Parker is really good at using her feminine charm in a grift now, and Hardison has taken over Nate's most outrageous roles. Eliot does the day-to-day grifting, the long term characters, and Parker is careful not to ask him to pretend to be sighted too often, like Nate did sometimes.

But for all of Nate's brilliance, the way his extravagant plans nearly always panned out in the most unexpected way, Parker's creativity really is something to see. It's like it was stifled, all the time she obeyed Nate and stayed in the shadows. There were brief strokes of genius, but she was still trying to accept herself and grow the confidence she needed to bloom.

Her cleverness is in the small things. She doesn't care about fireworks−fireworks are nice, but they're loud and they hurt the eyes. Her cons aren't for show. But if there's a little something extra that she can obtain for the client, or something nice that can come out of a job for a bystander, and it doesn't put her team in danger? She'll go for it. Even if no one notices. Sometimes it takes Eliot months to piece it all together.

She doesn't go for the obvious route. She doesn't think outside the box, because no box can keep Parker contained. She needs no effort to make the box simply disappear.

"I don't understand why you can't see it," she tells Hardison when he stands gobsmacked in front of one of her carefully designed plans. The links she makes, the patterns that she connects, are perfectly natural to her. Even Eliot, who is usually good at this, can't follow her fully down those paths, through the leaps of reasoning that she takes like breathing.

The amazing thing is, it works. Just like Nate's outrageously complicated cons, Parker's beautiful, elegant plans work. Not always, not perfectly, and when something goes wrong that Parker had not foreseen at all, since dealing with humans is always unpredictable, Eliot takes over. But they always get out, they always stay safe, and they get what they came for.

And the pride Eliot feels for his team right now, as they sit together and hang out after a job gone well, is something he will cherish to his dying day.

1


	15. Chapter 15

This is sometimes in Leverage season 3 or 4. In this AU, the whole team lives in the building above the bar, not just Nate.

Hyperacusis (sensitivity to noise) is one of the things that's very present in my everyday life and that I struggle with, so I hope I managed to make it come through in writing.

* * *

**Noise**

"The mark is going to be at the commercial center on Tuesday..."

Eliot sighs as the rest of Nate's sentence is drowned out in the hubbub of the crowded pub. What is Nate thinking, holding their meeting down in the pub on a Saturday night?

He's thinking about his whiskey, Eliot realizes. He's lost count of the glasses Nate has ordered, but disapproval radiates out of Sophie beside him. Eliot tries, once more, to get back on track, but he can barely understand more than every other word Nate says.

How can the others stand this? Eliot tries to distinguish what's going on around him, but the noise is disorienting. He can't hear the layout of the room, although he knows it by heart. He luckily got here early enough to get the seat by the wall, so he's not bumped into, but the conversations and the clinks and clangs of dishes and glasses are deafening.

"...Eliot, you'll..."

Eliot blinks at hearing his name, and does one more effort to understand Nate, but at that moment the noise of a glass hitting the floor and shattering makes him jump. His hand make an involuntary movement toward his ears, though he forbids himself from going through with it. Parker, across from him, lets out a hurt animal squeak, and Eliot can tell she's having just as much trouble with the situation as he does.

"Eliot!" Nate calls.

"No," Eliot growls. "I'm out of here." Getting the words out of his mouth feels like spitting acid.

He stands up angrily, and winces when his chair grates on the floor. It barely registers over the noise of the pub, but it makes his skin crawl. He shakes his white cane to unfold it, if only to signal to people to give him space. With how crowded the pub is, it's not going to make much of a difference, but he can't hear his surrounding properly, so it might protect him from running into too many people.

It's only once he's in the elevator that he starts breathing again. He leans against the wall, trying to ignore the beeps and the automated voice giving out floor numbers. His head hurts.

In the corridor to his apartment, he hears Parker's light footsteps before she reaches him. She doesn't touch him, but she claps her hands softly by his face.

Eliot nods at the unspoken question, and unlocks the door. Parker comes in behind him, now tapping her hand on her chin, just loud enough that Eliot can hear. His own hands are wringing, nails digging into his palms and fingers painfully pressing together. He makes an effort to stop and grabs his book instead, sitting down on the couch and bringing his legs under him. The raised Braille dots under his fingers always calm him down, even when he's not trying to make sense of it.

Parker lies in one of her impossibly flexible positions, on her front with her legs over the back of the couch. They don't touch, but they're together. Away from the noise. The others will have questions, but it can wait. Right now Eliot can just enjoy the quiet and try to get his thoughts right way up again.


	16. Chapter 16

I wasn't inspired by this prompt, but then I realized I already had a text that fits. So this is actually an excerpt from the next chapter of Every Chance We Get, which I hope to be able to post soon.

It takes place at the very beginning of the Wedding Job, when Sophie brings in her friend as a client.

* * *

**Play**

When Hardison tells him that Sophie has brought in a new client and that Nate isn't even here yet, Eliot carefully retreats into the end of the corridor they've turned into a break area, out of sight. He does not want to be there when Nate explodes. The man has control issues.

He settles into an armchair with a book and reads until Parker comes out of the conference room with their new client's daughter. From their whispered conversation, Eliot surmises she's teaching the girl how to pick a padlock.

Listening to Parker's interaction with the little girl, Eliot can't help but smile. So maybe learning to pick locks isn't the first activity he would have proposed to a nine-year-old, and her mother might not appreciate it, but both girls sound like they're having the time of their lives.

"There, can you feel this? The way it clicks right there?" Parker asks. She's focused in the way she only is when doing something stealing or jumping-related, yet all her attention is on the little girl.

"Yes!"

"Okay, we've got one more pin to go," Parker says. "A little further in...and you've got it opened!"

The girl squeals in delight, while Parker claps her hands. Eliot joins her, dropping his book on his lap, though he knows it was more a mark of excitement than an applause. Parker has many different flaps for all kinds of situation, and he's just starting to recognize them.

"Eliot!" Parker calls out, like she's only noticing now that he's in the room. She's been too deeply involved in connecting with the little girl to pay attention to her surroundings, which also means she feels safe enough here not to be vigilant.

"You want to try too?" Parker asks him.

"Nah, keep going. You sound like you're doing great."

"Okay," Parker says. "This is Eliot," she whispers to the girl, loud enough that he can hear. "He's a real-life superhero."

"What does he do?" the girl asks in an even louder whisper.

"He's like Daredevil," Parker says. "He's blind, but he can hear _everything._ And he wins all his fights."

"Who do you fight, Mr Eliot?" the girl asks Eliot directly this time.

"What's your name?" Eliot asks her instead of answering.

"Chiara."

"Well, Chiara, I fight people who do bad things and hurt other people."

Eliot reflect that it's the first time he can say that and be certain that it's the truth. He's tried, ever since he left San Lorenzo, to avoid beating up innocent people, but at the end of the day, he was still taking the jobs he was offered.

With Nate, he can trust that they're doing the right thing.


	17. Chapter 17

**Mind**

Cassandra doesn't know exactly when her understanding of things changes. She's always known she was different in some way, of course, though not exactly how. For years, as a child, she walked through the world unconcerned by how other people saw things.

The label came early on. _Autistic_. Her parents rejected it, fired the expensive psychologist they'd hired, and rewrote it. _Gifted._

_Genius._

But Cassandra is no genius. How can she be, when tying her own shoelaces seems like an impossible task? How can a genius not know how to talk to people? She's four years old when she looks up the definition in the dictionary, and decides there must be a mistake.

But if her parents think that it's what she is, and they're so proud of her, then she has to become one. She has to work hard and fake it until she makes it.

She doesn't know _what_ makes her different. Things that seem impossible to her are so easy for everyone else, but she does them anyway. Because now that she's on this path, failure isn't an option. And if she's tired in the evening, so tired that she can't speak or move anymore, that her head hurts so much she wants to cry, well, everyone else must feel that too, right?

Some things are easy. If she's doing math problems, she can lose herself into the work and forget about the world. About the kids at school who laugh when she opens her mouth. About her mother's tiny frown when she brings back anything less than full marks. About the pain in her head that never seems to go away, these days.

After the first time she tries to tell her preschool teacher that the numbers in her book are the wrong color, and she gets punished for her efforts, she never speaks again about the beauty of numbers and formulas and words and sentences, dancing in her head and making swirls of colors.

She doesn't tell anyone when they start smelling like food, either, and the headaches get worse. Or when she starts hearing music that isn't being played. Or the first time the numbers dance so hard that her nose starts bleeding.

Because all that must be normal, normal for the _genius _her parents want for a daughter, or it will mean that she failed.

She has a wall full of science trophies by the time she faints in front of her whole class, and wakes up in the hospital. She's shown scans of her own brain and the black spot that represents what's _wrong_ with her. She's told that she won't get to live long enough to be a real genius, and that she shouldn't trust anything her brain tells her.

If she's in pain, it's because of the tumor in her brain.

If she feels different, it's because of the tumor.

If she can't tie her shoelaces, it's because of the tumor, but she needs to make an effort.

If she sees beautiful things and can make incredible calculations, it's because of the tumor, and it's not real.

Nothing is real. She can't trust anymore that what she touches, what she sees, what she hears, what she _thinks_ is really there.

She walks through life like a zombie, because _not real_ is _wrong_. And if the things around her are not real, then how can she be real?

Even her pain is not real: it's _all in her head._

It takes a long time for her vision to shift. It takes getting swept into a strange world, with a beautiful library and monsters more dangerous than she ever imagined. Magic. It takes thinking she can be cured and betraying the first people she's ever felt _normal_ with. It takes cases and missions and friendships and confessions and fallouts. It takes a surgery that almost kills her, and leaves her brain a different place.

It takes going full circle, back to the little girl who thought if she faked it well enough, she would become what other people wanted her to be. She hasn't seen her parents in years, but she's still trying to reach their ideals, because she's never made ones of her own.

And finally, she finds out.

_All in her head_ isn't _fake_.

_Not real_ isn't _wrong_.

_Different_ isn't _bad_.

She understands that yes, her perception of reality _is_ different from other people's. Not just because of the tumor, but because her brain is wired differently. She's _autistic._

_Autistic_ is _okay_.

And here, there are people like her. Flynn, and Jake. Even Ezekiel, but Ezekiel is his own brand of different. She's found where she belongs.

She doesn't just have a beautiful mind. She has a mind of her own.

2


	18. Chapter 18

Jake and Eliot, 19 years old. Jake has dropped out of college, and Eliot just came back from the war. Finding a sense of direction again is hard.

* * *

**Direction**

"I'm lost," Eliot says for the first time, two days after he gave Jake the worst scare of his life.

Jake looks up at him from his bed. They've been sleeping in the same room since Eliot came back from overseas, like when they were children.

"You're lost," Jake repeats almost automatically, for lack of a better response. It surprises him. Not that Eliot feels lost, but that he's finally admitting to it. He's spent the last month pretending everything was fine, until Jake found him in Willie's office with the barrel of a gun in his mouth. Since then he's been avoiding every conversation.

Jake is lost too, lost as to what to do to help his twin. He's been lost for a lot longer, since he dropped out of college at Christmas and moved into his sister's spare room. He's not the one Eliot should ask for advice. He's not the one anyone should ask for advice.

"I don't know what to do," Eliot says.

"You're still recovering," Jake eyes his brother's arm, still resting in a sling. "You have a bullet hole in your shoulder. You're not supposed to do anything."

Eliot is recovering from far more than a bullet hole and a broken collarbone, Jake knows. It's the things he doesn't talk about, that make his eyes go unfocused and his sleep restless. The things that made him want to…

Jake doesn't even want to put a word on it. He doesn't think Eliot would have one through with it, or that it was more than a spur of the moment panic, but it still happened. He spent so much time trying to prove to Eliot last summer that no, the slashes on his forearms and the pills he nearly overdosed on weren't an attempt to end his life. And now…

Now the situation is reversed, somehow.

Jake feels the sudden urge to touch his brother, to make sure he's really alive. Eliot has shied from every touch since coming back, except a single, quick, panicked hug after Jake managed to take the gun from him.

He keeps his hands to himself, and traces patterns onto his bed sheet instead.

"It's like...I have no sense of direction. It's all gone. The Army...they gave me places to go, things to do. Even in the hard times."

Jake knows the feeling. He had a path lying before him, even if it wasn't the one his father wanted. He had a university degree to get, studies to do, a future laid out in front of him.

Now he has a guest bedroom he needs to move out of, since her sister's baby will come soon, and a bottle of anti-depressants.

"You'll find it again," he tells Eliot.

Eliot has always been so much better at this. At making up his mind, at finding solutions. He's better at everything, really. Jake is lost without him.

"I think I want to reenlist," Eliot says. "Once my shoulder's healed up."

Jake nods. It's the last thing he wants, if he's honest with himself. More months of waiting for news, of wondering if his brother is still alive, of being _alone._

"You'll do great there," he says.

Of getting his brother back, only it's not really the same person. It's someone new, with shadows in his eyes and shaking hands.

"I know you don't like it. It's just...the only thing I can see myself doing," Eliot says.

"I know," Jake murmurs. "If that's the direction where you want to go, I'll support you all the way."

"What about you?" Eliot looks up, coming close to meeting his eyes for the first time. "Where do you want to go?"

Jake shrugs. "I'm not ready to decide," he sighs. "I'm staying here. Pop needs help with the books, so I can do that."

"You can't work for Pop your whole life, Jake. This isn't who you are."

"Maybe not. But that's what I'm gonna do for now."

"You're gonna waste your life if you stay around here. When you're bored out of your mind, what will you do?" Eliot asks.

"We'll see," Jake rolls his eyes. "Maybe you're right, maybe I'll waste my life here."

"I hope you don't. I hope you find some new direction to go in," Eliot says quietly. "And when you do, I'll be here to cheer you on."


	19. Chapter 19

[mentions of self-harm, death, injuries]

As often, it got darker than I expected.

* * *

**Alone**

Parker sits on top of a building, her bag which only contains Bunny and the first rig she made all by herself forgotten on the floor.

"_I've taught you all I know," _Archie said. _"It's time you leave and take your own jobs._"

Parker never imagined that she would stay with Archie forever. Archie has a real family, he doesn't have time for her. But somewhere along the way, she got attached.

She managed to lift his wallet without him even noticing before she left, but she doesn't even feel proud. Maybe it's because the wallet was empty except for a single bill, a prop wallet made just for her. Archie's parting gift.

She read somewhere that people her age, going away from home for the first time, have their lives ahead of them. But it's not what it feels like to her. Maybe because she's never had a home to leave.

She feels like she's drifting. The unknown is not a depth she wants to jump into.

Archie wasn't much of a father, but he was her only anchor.

She's alone, now.

* * *

Cassandra packs her suitcase slowly, methodically. Today, she's leaving the house she's spend her entire life in−the house that never felt like a home.

"_We've talked about it, and we want you to leave. You're of age now, and there's no point in hanging around since you're not going to make anything of your life."_

She won't have a life to make something out of. All her dreams, of long college studies and research and science experiments, everything is gone. She's known it for nearly four years, and it's already four years she spent trying to pretend they might not be her last.

She's a little relieved at her parents throwing her out, to be honest. They don't let her do anything by herself, so it's a step she had a hard time taking on her own. But she doesn't know where to go. She has some money, saved up from the college fund she'll never use, what's left over from the expensive treatments and surgeries that didn't do anything to help. She won't be living on the streets, not yet.

But she has no friend, no one to go to. The person she's the closest to is her neurosurgeon, and she doesn't see herself show up at his doorstep. Her parents will probably cut all contact the moment she steps foot outside. She'll have to make it by herself somehow, for whatever time she has left.

She's alone, now.

* * *

Jake rubs his thumb over the small dog tag that bears his twin brother's name. He's only had it for five days, but he already knows it by heart, the feeling on the raised writing, the little noise it makes when it clings against his desk, the sensation of it around his neck.

It's all he has left.

Eliot is gone. Dead. That's what the man who came to Pop's house said.

Jake can't register it yet, not really. Eliot has been overseas for months, and Jake still expects to see him to come through the door in his fatigues, steal Jake's guitar and start jamming.

But he won't.

Ruth cried and hugged Jake and tried to explain to her two-year-old boy that his uncle, a man he probably doesn't even remember, isn't coming home. Jake hugged his sister back and his eyes stayed dry, but at night, he took a razor to his arm.

The memorial was yesterday. There was no body to bury, but people dressed up and came and brought flowers. Jake didn't speak the whole day.

He's alone, now.

* * *

Eliot struggles with his weak right hand, the only part of his body he can move right now, to get the straw properly into his mouth. The straw keeps rolling away. He flings the glass in frustration and hears it hit the wall. It's plastic, so it doesn't even give him the satisfaction of shattering.

"_You should have left me there to die," _he told Nate yesterday. Eliot believes it, but it seems to have shaken the man to his core. Nate sits here today, probably watching him, but he stays silent.

Eliot growls. "Go home," he says. "There's no point in you being here if you're not going to talk. I can't even tell where you are."

"I'm not coming back, Eliot," Nate says. "I'm sorry. I have to take care of my family, and go back to my job."

"I understand," Eliot wants to say, but he doesn't. Nate has better things to do than staying at the bedside of a man whose life is already over.

But there's no one else.

"I hope you get better," Nate murmurs, standing up.

He leaves the room quietly, and Eliot blinks back exhausted tears as he hears the door close behind him.

He's alone, now.

* * *

Four years later, Jake gets a phone call, out of the blue.

"_It's Eliot."_

Nine years later, Parker gets a crew, and among them a blind man, who happens to be a hitter, and a chef, too.

"_So, how do I become your guide dog?"_

Eleven years later, Cassandra walks into a Library.

"_'Little lady' is actually not an improvement over 'maid'"_

Twelve years later, Eliot sits in his apartment, his arm around Cassandra, listening to Jake and Parker argue about monetary versus aesthetic value of famous paintings. He can't help smiling.

He's not alone anymore.


	20. Chapter 20

**Movement**

Parker has flaps and stims for every situation. Eliot notices her flapping her hands from the day they meet, but it takes him longer to decode the language. Each stim speaks to Parker's state of mind, to all the things she doesn't say aloud. People say autistics don't know body language, but it's wrong. Parker just has her own body language, like Jake used to before he was forced to learn to speak. Like Eliot probably should have had, but he buried it so far inside that he doesn't remember how to move in ways that feel natural.

"Can you hear that?" Parker keeps asking Eliot at first, waving in front of his face. "Can you feel this?"

Eliot is annoyed for a while, until he realizes why she does that. Parker's stims are communicative, every one of them. She wants him to know what she's doing.

He can't hear her flap in the air, so she'll hum softly into her palm as she shakes her hand. She'll clap her hands together. She'll steal men hoodies from Hardison's stash in Lucille and flap with the too-long sleeves. All just so Eliot can hear. He loves listening to her stim. He even joins in sometimes, letting himself clap in excitement or rub his cheek in contentment.

Sometimes when Parker's impatient, she'll flap her hands at her side, hitting her hips, and she sounds and probably looks like a bird chick trying to fly. When she's bored, if she really has to stay still, she'll hit one fist against her palm again and again, and it make a muffled sound.

She uses stimtoys, too, but only for the stims that are personal, that she doesn't need anyone to see. She always has a tangle or a rainbow spring somewhere in her pockets, usually sewn into her clothes especially.

Sometimes Eliot stops Hardison in the middle of a rant about people who don't understand Internet security when he hears Parker aggressively tap her hands against her hips.

"Parker, do you need a hug?" he asks.

"How do you know?" Parker

"It's a distinctive flap," Eliot answers, opening his arms.

He smiles when he finds himself with an armful of Parker.

1


	21. Chapter 21

**Music**

There is no music to Jake's ear as fascinating as foreign languages.

He does love a good country album, mostly because it reminds him of his and Eliot's jam sessions so long ago, and Eliot's beautiful singing voice. He likes listening to the radio on long drives as much as the next person, or putting some quiet classical piece in the background when he's working on a lengthy article. But he likes none of that as much as stopping in the street to listen to a group of strangers are debating over a map.

Back in Oklahoma, he rarely heard anything other than English. So he took to books and movies, and taught himself French, Spanish, German, Latin and Ancient Greek. He found pen pals, long before he had access to the Internet, and wrote back and forth with people from all over. He found music in other languages too, just to let himself be lulled to sleep by the foreign sounds.

His passion for history and art fit well with his thirst for languages. He learned to read more old, long lost languages like Ancient Egyptian, but he missed the sounds.

So he turned to the languages of his own country. Navajo, Apache, Comanche. And then, the rest of the world. He never truly learned to speak them, but he listened for the incredible sounds his tongue couldn't reproduce, the grammar structure his brain could barely make sense of, the words whose meanings escaped him.

The cracking and breathy voice of Chinanteco. The strange tongue clicks of Xhosa. The unending word-sentences of Inuktitut. The beautiful rounded script of Georgian, and its impossible verb structure. The eighteen grammatical genders of Swahili. The vowel harmonies of Walpiri and Finnish. He'll pick words and phrases and repeat them again and again, in his head, or aloud when he's alone, just to hear the sound of them.

But the language Jake is most at ease with, on the days when everything feels like it's upside down and there's the weight of an elephant on his chest, is sign language. He's learned half a dozen of them, and he's barely ever met someone else who uses them, but signs are so much easier than words.

Because Jake loves listening to the music of languages, but his own tongue is heavy and clumsy and his first language is images and sounds and ideas, not English. Speaking always take a lot of effort, except if it's about art history. He prefers to just sit and open his ears.

1


	22. Chapter 22

**Joy**

"Whooohoooo!" Parker shouts as she jumps. The wind in her face is briefly deafening, but it's a kind of deafening that she enjoys, that she seeks out. She'll open the window in the car while driving on the highway, just to feel that rush. But it's never as good as when she jumps from a building.

"Aaaaaaaahhh!" Hardison screams beside her, holding onto her hand tightly. They've jumped together many times, but he hasn't lost the initial terror at finding himself in free fall. He's not doing it just to please her, though, Parker checked. And then she checked again, and again, because she knows allistics sometimes say things they don't mean.

"It makes me scared, but it's a good kind of scared," Hardison said. "Kinda like watching a horror movie. I want to be scared like this. I trust you to keep us safe."

Parker smiled and kissed him, even though she doesn't do that often.

"Always," she said.

She meant it. It might be Eliot's task to keep them safe on jobs, but in the air she's the one who does that.

While Nate does whatever it is he needs to do to grieve his father, which somehow involves a boat and doesn't involve Sophie, Parker and Hardison go together on a world tour. They spend a few days in each city, they go to the museums where Hardison gushes over the paintings and Parker over the security systems, they go underground to strange nerd reunions involving dices and orcs, which Parker watches with wide eyes, and they go jumping off buildings.

And it's the best vacation Parker has ever had−not just because it's the first.

She once thought that being alone in the night and jumping off a very tall building was the highest peak of joy she could feel. But it wasn't.

Jumping hand in hand with Hardison, in broad daylight, falling together, is better.

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	23. Chapter 23

This is the last day of this challenge. I wanted today's text to be special, given the theme, but it turned out to be quiet and simple and in harmony with the rest of the series, I think.

I missed seven days, so I may come back and do them one day, or maybe not. I'm fairly happy that I managed to get this far and write 23 texts, that spanned pretty much the whole AU, and that all are on themes close to my heart.

If you've read and enjoyed it, please don't hesitate to let me know! I want to publish the next chapter of Every Chance We Get soon, and then hopefully keep posting at a better rhythm that I have so far, but in the meantime I would really love to hear your thoughts.

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**Acceptance**

"I like how you turned out," Hardison says to Parker, when they've only known each other for a couple of months.

The phrase sticks with Parker for a long time. She mouths it to herself sometimes, when she's alone in a vent. It's so incongruous to her, it seems impossible that someone would really think that about her.

She grows to know Hardison well enough to be sure that he meant it. But she still doesn't understand why. She's everything a parent would never want their child to become: she's a thief, she doesn't know how to make friends, people run away from her. Sometimes literally. She's not _normal_.

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But she progressively gets it. First, Hardison is hardly normal either_._ When they meet, Parker doesn't know enough normal to notice, but he doesn't fit perfectly with regular people either. None of the crew does. Maybe Nate and Sophie can seamlessly integrate into society, but they live mostly outside it.

They don't just not treat her like a freak, they also don't treat her like a child. They don't try to make her change who she is, but Sophie and Eliot will teach her new things if she asks. Nate grooms her to be a good mastermind, but after his failed first tries early on, he doesn't try to make her into something she's not.

That's new, to Parker. Everyone in her life has always treated her like she was somehow broken, until she came to believe it.

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It's in the little things. Hardison always asks before touching her, and he waits for her to write or sign or use pictograms when spoken words won't get past her mouth. He's just as patient with Eliot, and the grumbles and bad mood that hide the moments when he's tired or in pain. He rarely shows it, but he's always attentive to their comfort.

Eliot hugs her, tight, when her skin is crawling and she wants to crawl into a small space. He's warm and soft and much better than a vent. He cooks food that she can eat, even when he makes a face and tell her it's not good for her health.

In return, Parker subtly changes all her flaps so that they make noise that Eliot can hear. She listens to him talk about the best way to cut tomatoes, even though he won't even let her near his kitchen knives. She snuggles up close to Hardison and comforts him when he dreams of drowning, or being buried alive, even if she doesn't know the right words.

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For years though, their little crew is like an island. They fit well enough together, but they don't have anyone else. Parker still doesn't fit in with normal people if she's not wearing her Alice White mask. She knows that won't change, and maybe that's okay. Maybe she can have Hardison and Eliot and Nate and Sophie and it's enough.

* * *

Nate and Sophie leave, though they're still in contact, and they occasionally come back for a job or two, but for Parker, it's a plunge into the unknown. The crew she's grown so comfortable with is gone.

It takes adjustment. Eliot has as much of a hard time as she does with change, and Hardison's confidence needs building up. But they make it. Better than that, they thrive. Their little team of three does things that they never even dreamed of, and they complete each other, like a perfect fit. There's still no one else in their lives, though people come and go, Quinn, Amy, Peggy and even Hardison's Nana. But Parker is never completely herself with them.

* * *

She doesn't truly realize what's changed until she meets Jake and Cassandra. They're just like Parker was years ago, at first, when Hardison said that to her. "I like how you turned out." They're lost souls suddenly thrown into a place where there are people ready to accept them for who they are.

She watches them grow into it. She keeps her distance, a bit, because Jake is Eliot's brother and they have a lot of unresolved issues, that they need to work out without her in the way. Cassandra, despite her bubbling, exuberant personality, keeps everyone at bay. But Parker notices the little changes, the way that Jake is more and more comfortable talking about history, the way Cassandra stims with more confidence, when she realizes no one is going to "quiet hands" her.

She watches them, and she wants nothing more than to help, help Eliot build them a space where they can thrive, like Nate and Sophie and Hardison did for her. And she understands. These are two people who society thinks of as failures, as defective. People who didn't turn into who they were supposed to be, because that ideal was not a mold they could fit in.

They just needed to be accepted and loved.

"I like how you turned out."

She likes how they're turning out, too. There's no need to be _normal_ to be worthy. And if they find a place where they can grow, people like her can bloom into something beautiful.

She understands that, now. She's even starting to like how she turned out.


End file.
